The Book of Dreams and Ghosts

ous Hallucination. The Family Coach. Ghosts' Clothes and other Properties and Practices; how explained. Case of Veracious Hallucination. Riding Home from Mess. Another Case. The Bright Scar. The

es Coincident with Death. Othe

ontaneous waking hallucinations, according to the result of Mr. Galton's researches, though not nearly so common as dreams, are as much facts of sane mental experience. Now every ghost or wraith is a hallucination. You see your wife in the dining-roo

the knowledge may be done by audible words, with or without an actual apparition, or with an apparition, by words or gestures. Again, if a hallucination of Jones's presence tallies with a great crisis in Jones's life, or with his death, the hallucination is so far veracious in that, at least, it does not seem meaningless. Or if Jones's appearance has some unwonted feature not known to the seer, but afterwards proved to be correct in fact, that is veracious.

ledge of facts not previously known to the witness, and so the vulgar would call it a ghost. Both appearances were very rich and full of complicated detail. Indeed, a

We do not see people naked, as a rule, in our dreams; and hallucinations, being waking dreams, conform to the same rule. If a ghost opens a door or lifts a curtain in our sight, that, too, is only part of the illusion. The door did not open; the curtain was not lifted. Nay, if the wrist or hand of the seer is burned or withered, as in a crowd of stories, the ghost's hand did not prod

ey are all the "stuff that dreams are made of". But occasionally things are carried to a great pitch, as when a ghost drives off in a ghostly dogcart, with a

D FAMI

in the bushes. Mr. Hyndford saw it perfectly distinctly; it was a slightly antiquated family carriage, the sides were in that imitation of wicker work on green panel which was once so common. The coachman was a respectable family servant, he drove two horses: two old ladies were in the carriage, one of them wore a hat, the other a bonnet. They passed, and then Mr. Hyndford, going through the gap in the bushes, rode

arance a ghostly one. The name, however,

HOME FR

Lieutenant B., who died, as researches at the War Office prove, at Peshawur on 2nd January, 1854. The house was on a spur of the hill, three or four hundred yards under the

. "At this time the two dogs came, and crouching at my side, gave low frightened whimpers. The moon was at the full, a tropical moon, so bright that you could see to read a newspaper by its light, and I saw the party above me advance as plainly as if it were noon-day; they were above me some eight or ten feet on the bridle road. . . . On the party came, . . . and now I had better describe them. The rider was in full dinner dress, with white waistcoat and a tall chimney-pot hat, and he sat

face, he was stouter than when Mr. Barter

reached the bridle path where the group had stopped, and found nobody. Mr. Barter ran up the path for a hundred yards,

bloated before his death, and while on the sick list he allowed the fringe to grow in spite of all we could say

led him one day, riding in his reck

previously to General Barter, namely, that Lieutenant B. grew stout and wore a beard before his death, also that he had owned a brown pony, with black mane and tail. Even granting that the ghosts of the pony and lieutenant were present (both being dead), we are not informed that the grooms were dead also. The hal

explain Mr. Hyndford's view of the family

ad conveyed information not known to the seer, and so

RIGHT

me conscious that some one was sitting on his left, with one arm on the table. It was his dead sister. He sprang up to embrace her (for even on meeting a stranger whom we take for a dead friend, we never realise the impossibility in the half moment of surprise) but she was gone. Mr. G. s

herself, she said that, unknown to any one, she had accidentally scratched the face of the dead, apparently with the pin of her brooch, while arranging something about the corp

the mother's, and if there is any "mental teleg

for fancy, and for conscious or unconscious hoaxing. You see a spook in Castle Dangerous. You then recognise the portrait in the hall, or elsewhere. The temptation to recognise the spook r

on Illusions by Mr. James Sully, a case is given. A lady (who corroborated the story to the present author) was vexed all night by a spectre in armour. Next morning she saw, what she had not previously observed, a portrait of the spectre in the room. Mr. Sully explains that she had seen the portrait unconsciously,

N AND THE

rd nothing about hauntings in the house occupied by herself and her h

blind aside, and there on the grass was a very beautiful young girl in a kneeling posture, before a soldier in a general's uniform, sobbing and clasping her hands together, entreating for pardon, but alas! he only waved her away from him. So much did I feel for the girl that I ran down the st

ent, began to feel nervous, an

d family, her predecessors in the house. The poor girl tried in vain to

rence [of the vision] when I called with my husband at a house where there was a portrait of

here he knew it to be without telling her of its existence. Mrs. M. turned pale when she saw it. Mr. M. knew the sad ol

do not believe in veracious dreams. Mr. Galton, out of all his packets of reports of hallucinations, does not even allude to a veracious example, whether he has records of such a thing or not. Such reports, however, are ghost stories, "which we now proceed," or continue, "to narrate". The

e ways the surest, is in others the most easily deceived. Some people who cannot call up a clear mental image of things seen, say a saltcellar, can readily call up a mental revival of the feeling of touching sal

STRAIN

. . . Having done with the letters, I made an effort to throw them into the fire, when I distinctly felt my hand arrested in the act. It was as though another hand were gently laid upon my own, pressing it back. Much sur

s mind knew what she was about, and started an unreal but veracious feelin

h a lady and another companion, were standing on the veranda at the back of a house in Dumfriesshire, waiting for a cab to take one of them to the station. They heard a cab arrive and draw up, went round

ane. When the voices are veracious, give unknown information, they are in the same case as truthful dreams. I offer a few from the exper

DICTINE'

ssions. He prayed for enlightenment, and soon afterwards heard an in

that in my circumstances i

that a public event of great importance would occur at a given date. It did occur. About the same time, being abroad, he was in great anxiety as to a

arth did

-'s voice t

ed years befor

ffection probably divined facts, which did not present themselves

voice say "Open the door" four times, did so, then fainted, and

and many voices, like Dr. Johnson's mother's, when he heard her call his name, she being hundreds of miles away, le

of New Zealand believe that if one sees a body lying across a path or oneself on t

N AT T

n in front of it, stopped, and when the lighted lift came up, found that the door was wide open and that, had she run on as she intended, she would have fallen down the well. Here part of her

wraiths". A, when awake, meets B, who is dead or dying or quite well at a distance. The number o